Confusing times in Colombia

Today it was announced that Piedad Cordoba, famous Colombia senator, would be banned from running for public office for 18 years. She was accused of treason (which was apparently dropped) and overstepping her duties. I believe she was also accused with promoting and sharing the FARC's ideology of just distribution of resources. Sounds like a crime for the thought-police, or a "crime of opinion" as one opposition politician fears.

Basically, Cordoba had been appointed some years ago by then-president Alvaro Uribe to hold hostage negotiations with the FARC insurgent group. It seems she was successful in this endeavor, because over the years numerous hostages have been unilaterally released by the FARC. However, the polemical, right-wing inspector general in Colombia decided that she went beyond her duties in her dealings with the insurgent group.

A major problem for me with this is that they are charging her based on evidence allegedly acquired from a FARC leader's computer years ago. But I assume this computer is classified evidence, because they aren't presenting the bases of the charges. This is always a problem with secret accusations, and the reason why we in Colombia and the civilized world insist on open judiciary processes. Furthermore, this is not going to lead to a trial. It is a decision that the inspector general is entitled to take, and there's no higher court to appeal to.

Anyway, I understand that Cordoba is considering suing the inspector general in the Constitutional Court. I hope she's successful.

Cordoba has been one of the few voices in Colombia in the recent past insisting on a negotiated end to our long-running war. While Uribe (and to a lesser extent his successor Santos) have always focused on military solutions, Cordoba and a few others have advocated dialogue. I think Cordoba's approach is right. To attempt a purely military solution to the Colombian conflict is to deny that there are deeper-seated reasons for it. It's as if there are a bunch of crazy guys who decided one day to put on fatigues and take up AK-47s and mount an insurgency, so all you need to do is get rid of the baddies and everything will be fixed. We in the US have seen that this doesn't work with religious terrorist groups, and in the case of an economically-motivated insurgent movement like the FARC or the ELN, such a purely military approach is all the more ineffective. If there remain persistent conditions of concentration of land and wealth, lack of respect for human rights, and corruption, then you can never get rid of unrest and anger in the population. Granted, in times like the past few years when the heavy-handed approach seems to be working, the voice of dialogue and reason may seem silly, ineffective, and even a conjurer of future ills. But I believe that if you look at a long enough timeframe, it will always be evident that pure force can only resolve social conflicts temporarily.

Sure, it might be possible to eliminate the FARC group through purely military means. Indeed, the recent blows to the FARC make it seem possible that they might be eliminated as a coherent organization. But if there remains a huge gap between rich and poor, and peasants and slumdwellers are desperate and destitute due to a system they know is unfair, you will never get rid of the unrest that was originally behind the FARC or any other leftist group.

What I foresee if Colombia continues on its current path is that we may "eliminate" the FARC and the ELN, just as a few years ago the AUC paramilitary coalition was officially disbanded. In the case of the AUC, a huge proportion of the ex-members simply re-formed into criminal groups with names like the Black Eagles, and now these so-called "emergent groups" are as bad as the AUC, possibly worse because they no longer have a guiding structure or political ideology. This isn't likely with the leftist groups, because despite their criminal dabblings, they remain at heart wholly ideological movements. So if the FARC were disbanded, I wouldn't expect a resurgence of smaller, freelance leftist groups. Certainly some ex-members would get into crime, but there wouldn't be a wholesale migration to new criminal groups.

However, if the economic, social, and even legal injustice that plagues much of Colombia isn't resolved, the frustration and anger and suffering of the common people will remain. Maybe FARC won't rise again, but we could easily see small-scale, local manifestations of discontent, either through legal channels or through insurgency. This could even coalesce someday into larger groups like the FARC or ELN of the past!

The other possibility would be that without leftist groups to provide some protection from the excesses of right-wing militias and powerful landlords, the peasantry would be so assailed by massacres, threats, forced displacement, land robbery, and the like, that no leftist response would re-form. This seems to be the case in northern Colombia, where injustice persists, but the paramilitary groups are so powerful that people don't voice their dissent, out of fear.

Neither of these possibilities--freelance leftist anarchy, or an obedient, terrified citizenry--is acceptable for me. Again, if we enacted real reforms to decrease the innate injustice in Colombian society, we might avoid these ugly scenarios. Indeed, Santos's ambitious land policies hold the promise of addressing the root causes of discontent and violence in Colombia. But many are skeptical that these policies, as progressive as they seem, can make a major change if wealthy oligarchs and criminals continue to hold lots of the strings of Colombia's government.

Maybe in the longer term we might become a society like Argentina or Chile. These countries, after undergoing years and even decades of murderous rightist dictatorships (which nobody hailed then or now for their progress against leftist insurgents or street crime), are today run-of-the-mill liberal democracies. People are more or less comfortable economically, inequality isn't obscene and suffocating for the masses, and mainstream politics tends toward the center-left. There are even frequent European-style protests by farmers and workers, demanding this or that benefit. I don't think this was the dream of any radical leftists in the Southern Cone of the 1960s and 1970s, but it seems like a decent-enough life. However, the overwhelming concentration of wealth in Colombia, our continued ostensible democracy despite left-wing insurgency and right-wing terror, and the distinct economic structure of our country make me think that the Southern Cone's boring but benign present is not in store for us. I fear what might be.